FREDDIE SLATER STEPS UP TO FORMULA 2 WITH INVICTA RACING IN 2027
Freddie Slater will race in FIA Formula 2 in 2027. The 18-year-old British driver, runner-up in this year’s FIA Formula 3 Championship, has signed with Invicta Racing, the team that won both the Drivers’ and Teams’ titles in F2 in 2024 and 2025. Slater will start working with his new team during the F2 post-season test.
Slater arrives after a strong first full season in F3 with Trident. He took one Feature Race win, three pole positions and eight podiums, and he led the championship after winning the Feature Race in Hungary. The title slipped away in the final rounds, though. At Monza he started the Feature Race from pole but retired with a technical problem, and in Madrid he failed to score in the first two races of the weekend.
He and Campos driver Ugo Ugochukwu started the last race level on 141 points, but Slater could only finish eighth, while Ugochukwu came home second and took the title by 14 points. It was the second time this year that the American beat Slater to a title, after the Formula Regional Oceania Trophy in New Zealand last winter.
The move to Invicta follows a well-known path. Gabriel Bortoleto, Leonardo Fornaroli and Rafael Câmara all won the F3 title with Trident before moving to Invicta in F2, where Bortoleto and Fornaroli became champions in their first season. Câmara is currently second in the 2026 F2 standings, only seven points behind leader Nikola Tsolov.
Slater is also the first driver of the Audi Driver Development Programme, which he joined at the start of this year as Audi entered Formula 1. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008, he moved to car racing in 2022 and quickly collected titles, winning the Ginetta Junior Championship in 2023, Italian and UAE Formula 4 in 2024, and the Formula Regional European Championship in 2025. Those results brought him offers from several F1 teams, but he and his management waited before choosing a junior programme.
Allan McNish, director of the Audi programme, described F2 as the natural next step for Slater and called Invicta the ideal environment for him. Slater said he learned a lot in F3 this year, both as a driver and as a person, and that he can’t wait to get started with the team.
The timing of his arrival is interesting. Invicta has been the benchmark team in the three seasons of F2’s current car, but the series will introduce a heavily updated version of its car in 2027, and Slater was at its launch at Monza. Speaking about it, he explained that F2 needs to follow the big changes Formula 1 made this year to remain a strong step on the ladder.
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